Vucic Pledges 16 Million Euros for Roads Near Prijepolje

President Aleksandar Vucic visited the rural tourism homestead “Srce Kamene Gore” in the Prijepolje municipality on August 10 and, standing before residents who had gathered to meet him, pledged at least 16 million euros for the reconstruction and construction of roughly 25 kilometers of roads in the area. The stop opened a two day tour of southwestern Serbia and was scheduled for 10 a.m.

Roads near Prijepolje were the first thing residents raised. Vucic asked them what mattered most, and the answer came back the same from several people. The delegation included Economy Minister Adrijana Mesarovic, Tourism Minister Husein Memic, Miroslav Alempic, an aide at the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, and Prijepolje municipality president Drago Popadic. The host was the homestead’s owner, Milan Bakovic.

Three sections, from Jabuka to Mileseva

The pledge covers three named routes:

• the section from the Pljevlja interchange to Jabuka, 14.8 kilometers long
• the road to Kamena Gora, 4.7 kilometers long
• the Mileseva road, leading toward Mileseva Monastery, about 5.5 kilometers long

“The Mileseva road needs to get done, that’s about 5.5 kilometers,” Vucic said in Prijepolje. For that section he cited a cost of around 850 million dinars, which means the shortest of the three routes accounts for a substantial share of the whole package. The president said the finished work would change what he called the “blood count” of Prijepolje.

Divide the announced sum by the announced length and it comes out to about 640,000 euros per kilometer. That price fits work on the road bed itself in mountainous terrain, where every culvert, retaining wall and switchback carries its own cost, and it differs from simply repaving existing asphalt on flat ground.

Why did residents ask for roads specifically?

Because roads decide whether people stay in the hamlet or leave it. The settlement in question has six active households growing raspberries, and the village counts 17 returnee households. Raspberries are picked and shipped on a tight schedule, so the state of the gravel road is a cost measured in crates and in hours spent driving to the cold store.

Vucic tied the condition of the roads to freight traffic.

“We can’t pretend nothing happened when for ten years you’ve been hauling out logs and everything else every three days. Heavy trucks destroy roads, end of story.”

The line was delivered in front of people who watch that traffic every day, and it amounts to an admission that logging in the area has not, until now, been matched by upkeep of the local road network. It is also the most concrete part of the explanation, since it justifies reconstruction rather than patching.

What else was on the first day’s schedule

After the homestead, the program called for an 11:10 a.m. visit to inspect the finishing work at the “Carolija” kindergarten in Prijepolje. Before noon came the new paint shop and sandblasting facility at FAP in Priboj, along with work on the Serbian Army’s new barracks in the same town. After 3 p.m. the president was due to visit a biomass boiler plant in Nova Varos and the Puric family, who have eight children, in the village of Radijevici.

For Tuesday, August 11, a visit to the bypass works around Zlatibor and to sports grounds was announced for after 5 p.m. The rest of the second day’s program will be released later.

What remains unresolved

No start date for the works has been announced, nor a contractor, nor section by section deadlines. The pledge amounts to a figure and three road names, which is more than had previously been made public about investment in this part of the Zlatibor District, but it is also everything there is so far. The first test of the promise will be the tender calls and the appearance of these sections in the plan of the Roads of Serbia agency.

In Prijepolje, Vucic also raised the issue of how local authorities treat citizens. He said more than 100 complaints about the municipality had come in through the “Ko si bre ti” portal, and he told officials to receive and hear out people who come to them. That message and the 16 million euro pledge were delivered in the same place, before the same people, which makes the visit as much a political event as an infrastructure one.

For Prijepolje, a municipality that has recorded years of population decline, the road to Kamena Gora and the road to Mileseva are more than just roads. One leads to hamlets where returnees are just starting to put down roots again, the other to the monastery that is the area’s strongest tourism draw. Whether the numbers add up will be clear only once the machines arrive on site.